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Pixmania increases its conversion rates by an average of 6% on its strategic website pages with Webtrends Optimize

The major high-tech e-commerce brand Pixmania, which operates fifteen online retail sites in Europe, is pursuing a strategy of innovation and operational transformation, in order to remain among the leaders of the industry. Subsequently, it has seen its conversion rates (the percentage of visitors progressing right through the buying cycle) rise by an average of 6% on its strategic website pages by implementing the Webtrends Optimize solution and working closely with a team of optimisation experts from Webtrends, the world leader in digital intelligence.

Optimize is a testing and targeting solution which helps to find the best combination of content and presentation on website pages in order to optimise conversion rates.

It combines a full range of test types, including A/B and multivariate testing. Advanced segmentation also makes it possible to identify and target the most profitable customer segments with personalised campaigns, by offering them the most relevant content.

The Pixmania team carries out an average of one A/B or multivariate testing campaigns a month, in liaison with Webtrends experts. It uses Optimize to achieve two objectives: on the one hand, to improve the user-friendliness and impact of strategic website pages in the buying cycle to increase conversion rates and sales; on the other hand, to measure the impact of sales techniques and various marketing campaigns on the conversion rate.

Pixmania’s tests focused on the most strategic pages in the buying cycle, based on measurements supplied by the Webtrends Analytics platform. Four types of page were therefore tested: the various homepages, product details, the search engine results page and the ordering process pages.

For example, on a product details page, a 6.9% improvement on the conversion rate was achieved by adjusting the position, size and colour of the elements. Even more spectacularly, by playing with the proportions, size and colour of the elements on the Christmas 2012 homepage and featuring eight products instead of four, Pixmania achieved a 4.3% increase on conversion rates to the “Basket” page compared to the original layout. This equates to 7,500 extra visitors on the payment page, or additional sales worth nearly 1 million euros.

“In order to optimize its sales and profitability in a highly competitive market, Pixmania has implemented a multi-year programme of innovation and operational optimisation. Webtrends Optimize perfectly fits with this programme. Its major advantage is that it has enabled us to design the main pages on our websites and improve them based on accurate measurements and conclusive results, armed with quantitative data, rather than simply relying on intuition as we have done in the past”, says Mr Hobeika. “Access to quantitative data allows us to make the case for the value of our improvement plans to the IT department and also to verify the validity of our hypotheses. Some of our initial ideas, which we believed were accurate, were invalidated by the tests”. Our ongoing test programme allows us to identify best practice and avoid mistakes.”

“We still have a lot of areas to explore and we are not yet exploiting the full potential of Optimize”, says Mr Hobeika. “Today, the experiment has shown us that this tool could be useful at every stage of the buying process, by optimising each stage. In practical terms, we could identify dozens of additional items to test on our site.”

The next step for Pixmania will involve using Optimize to segment and adapt its website to different customer profiles (targeting) in France and in other countries in order to offer each segment more tailored content.